Honolulu Top 40 Radio, 1963, A Paper Reel, and Vintage BBC Shows

A little story first - if you're not interested, feel free to move on down to the newly shared files, below the break.

Earlier this month, I experienced a personal crisis related to this site. I don't want to overstate this, because there are true crises and tragedies happening throughout the country and world right now, but this is something that would have made me quite sad, and would have impacted this site.

All of my sound files are housed on an external hard drive, one which is not very old. At the beginning of the month, it began failing. I started copying things to a cloud site (which I should have done before) while looking for a potential solution, and while I saved my song-poem files, it died before I moved anything I'd saved for this site (as well as many other files I only had in MP3 form, on that drive).

You see, I have a backlog of stuff for this site, and every time I post, it's a mixture of stuff I've just discovered and things I've been sitting on for months or years.

Happily, my neighbor - one with whom we are on excellent terms - owns a company within which transferring data to a new drive would be right up their alley. But.... he told me right off the bat that it was 50/50 that they'd be able to do anything, depending on what was broken about the drive.

I spent a restless week worrying about this, but just got the word that everything was saved. YAY!

In the meantime, I am working from home 80% of the time, which has given me the opportunity to digitize a stack of stuff that's been sitting, waiting for me to do so. I sit at my laptop at one end of the room, and the reel machine (near) silently sends the tape into the recording software, only giving me a sign to get up and change it when the tape runs out.

So it is that I have a bunch of stuff to share with you today, anyway, all of it newly digitized, while I wait for the return of my other material, on the brand new-and-improved hard drive that I just bought.

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So last time around, I was already in this "stay-at-home-and-digitize-at-the-same-time" mode, and the one item from that project which made the post was the Lucky Lager sales promotion. The next tape in that particular stacks (and oh, do I have stacks...) also had a Lucky Lager tie-in, and it is about as wonderful as it can get.

For what we have here is "Lucky Lager Dance Time", just under an hour of Top 40 radio programming from Honolulu, Hawaii, back on April 16th, 1963 (coincidentally, my mother's 40th birthday!). I'm guessing that tapes of early 1960's Top 40 radio from Hawaii are extremely rare (although I really don't know). Whether or not that's the case, this tape is wonderful.

Among all the standard hits of the day one would expect to hear from any American Top 40 station in April of 1963, there are a few tracks which seem to have been local hits, two "triple plays" for prizes, and a number one record "Sukiyaki", which wouldn't be number one nationally for another two months - it's not surprising that Hawaii would be at the forefront of this song's popularity in the US, given the large percentage of Hawaiian residents - then and now - who were/are of Japanese descent.

I also get a kick out of how many times, while talking at some length, the Deejay mentions that this is the station to listen to for less talking and more music.

The name of the station - KPOI, referencing the mainstay of the local cuisine - cracks me up, too.

Great stuff!

Download: Lucky Lager Dance Time - KPOI, 1380, Honolulu, April 16, 1963
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Next up, and very simply explained, is a set of two episodes of a show from the BBC, a show which could hardly be more British - full of explanations, assistance and other helpful information, all in response to listener queries.

I don't have a specific date on this, but the other material on the tape - which I will share another time - appears to be from 1961.

Download: BBC - Can I Help You - One Episode
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Download: BBC - Can I Help You - Another Episode
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And speaking of two episodes of a show on one tape, here's something really old. What you're about to hear is the complete contents of a paper reel - one of those Scotch Brand reels which sports the very first design available from the Scotch company, which I shared here. That's a box that most likely was phased out by 1950. This particular one sports its original price tag of $3.50, meaning that a single reel of tape in that era cost the equivalent of between $35 and $40 dollars in today's cash.

And what did this person choose to record? Well, at some point (it would appear), he recorded a broadcast of a Boston Pops concert, as the end of the reel features a couple of minutes of that show, complete with a commercial and barely any music.

But at two points in 1953, he recorded episodes of an NBC network show - as broadcast on a Minnesota station - titled "Critic at Large", and featuring Leon Pearson and his erudite, very sedate yet often cutting commentary on any number of things one can be a critic about and for. The first segment is undated, but multiple references put it squarely in April of 1953. For the second one, the owner of the machine helpfully dates it for us. When that one is over - that's when we hear what was being erased - the Boston Pops.

As far as I know, there is nothing remotely like this on radio or TV now, although I certainly remember such things within my lifetime, mostly prior to my adulthood, though (late 1970's). It's interested to think what the response to this sort of program of criticism and comment would be today. Blank stares, mostly, I'm guessing.

So let's travel back to a certain  very different point in time, for a very different kind of broadcasting:

Download: Leon Pearson, 'Critic At Large' - Spring, 1953 (KSTP, Minneapolis)
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Download: Leon Pearson, 'Critic At Large' - July 12, 1953 (KSTP, Minneapolis) (And a Bit of The Boston Pops)
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And if you want a sort of aural whiplash, from the sedate BBC of the early '60's and the suave and educated criticism of NBC in the early '50's, here's my very short reel of the day, an undated (I'm guessing 1980's) hard selling 30 second ad for a grocery store in northern Arkansas.

Download: Harps, Mountain Home, Arkansas, 30 Second Ad
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